The study set out to examine whether childhood personality would predict the timing of important transitional events moving into adulthood, including leaving the parents' home, establishing a romantic relationship, and entering the world of part-time work.

Participants consisted of 230 children who were studied every year from their first or second year in preschool until age 12. After age 12, the sample was reassessed twice, at ages 17 and 23. Researchers led by Jaap Denissen of Humboldt-University Berlin assessed degrees of shyness and aggressiveness through parental scales and teacher reports.

Denissen tested the hypotheses on the predictive validity of three major preschool personality types. Resilient personality is characterized by above average emotional stability, IQ, and academic achievement. Overcontrol is characterized by low scores on extraversion, emotional stability, and self-esteem. Undercontrol is characterized by low scores on emotional stability and agreeableness and high scores on aggressive behavior.

The 19-year longitudinal study illustrated that childhood personality types were meaningfully associated with the timing of the transitions. Resilient males were found to leave their parents' house approximately one year earlier than overcontrolled or undercontrolled children. Overcontrolled boys took more than a year longer than others in finding a romantic partner. Resilient boys and girls were faster in getting a part-time job than their overcontrolled and undercontrolled peers.

"Studies of so-called natural experiments will continue to be useful in elucidating the effects of life experiences on personality development," the authors conclude.

Despite the distinctive contributions these genes likely make to our species, little is known about the roles they play. Now scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have produced the first detailed analysis of the cellular functions of a hominoid-only gene, TBC1D3. They affirmed earlier evidence linking the gene to cancer, showing that TBC1D3's protein can keep cellular growth factors active and helps turn on RAS, a protein that is active in a third of all human cancers.

"I was astounded at how little attention has been given to human-specific genes, which make us what we are and could potentially offer a great deal of insight into human physiology," says senior author Philip D. Stahl, Ph.D., the Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. Professor and head of Cell Biology and Physiology. "In addition, certain pathogens, such as the malaria parasite, have human specific-components in their infection cycle. Human-only genes could offer us unique insights into how the parasites take advantage of us and possibly provide potent new avenues for fighting back."

The paper appears online in The Journal of Biological Chemistry.

When scientists want to learn more about the function of a gene, they frequently disable or delete the gene in a laboratory animal and then look to see how the loss changes the animal. That won't be possible with genes unique to humans, Stahl notes. Researchers will have to resort to altering the genes' functions in human cell lines, or transplanting them into animals to see what effects they have.

TBC1D3 was originally identified by other scientists as a likely contributor to breast cancer. At the time of its discovery, researchers linked its protein to endocytosis, a process cells use to take in material from their surface.

Endocytosis plays an important role in the Stahl laboratory. His group studies how growth factor receptors, proteins important for both normal and cancerous growth, are turned on and off. Found on the surfaces of cells, growth factor receptors turn on when they bind to a growth factor protein. To turn them off, cells take in the combined receptor-protein through endocytosis and put it through a number of different processes before finally breaking down the growth factor receptor.

When Stahl and colleagues determined in 2006 that the TBC1D3 gene is only found in hominoids, their curiosity was piqued. Evolution, Stahl notes, naturally tends to retain genes involved in the most important components of metabolism. If one of these genes mutated too dramatically, that would lead to an organism so sickly that it wouldn't survive long enough to perpetuate the mutation in its descendants. So evolution "conserves" these genes, retaining them largely unchanged as one species evolves into another.

Therefore, if the genome is compared to an automobile, human-only genes are unlikely to be adding new wheels. But they could, for example, be contributing a new anti-lock braking system: a regulatory function that fine-tunes essential processes originally established millennia ago in other species.

Stahl found evidence that this is the case in TBC1D3. Human DNA has eight copies or paralogs of the TBC1D3 gene. His lab showed that the increased levels of the protein made by one of the paralogs makes human cells grow more rapidly. When they transplanted the gene for the protein into mouse cells, it had the same effect.

A closer look showed that the protein from the TBC1D3 paralog delays a process that labels growth factor receptors for breakdown, prolonging the time that their signal is active.

He also found evidence that the protein was helping to activate RAS, another gene whose protein is commonly found in human cancers.

Stahl and his colleagues plan additional research to learn whether the other paralogs of TBC1D3 have different roles. He also has several ideas for learning more about the functions of human-only genes.

"We might try an organ-by-organ approach, looking to see if any genes specific to a particular organs, such as fat, are specific to humans," he says. "We also should probably look at crystallizing the proteins from some of these genes, which can tell us more about what they interact with."

There may be human diseases where these genes are mutated or missing, Stahl speculates. The effects of such conditions could provide important clues to what the humans-only genes do.

"It's also going to be very interesting for evolutionary biologists to try to develop a sense for where these humans-only genes come from," Stahl says. "The building blocks of these genes may be present but not active in earlier species."

Is it luck of the draw in poker? No, says Michael DeDonno, a doctoral student from Case Western Reserve University. He suggests putting your bets on skills over luck when playing the card game.

DeDonno's findings from two poker-related studies with college students have implications for the gaming industry, and possibly even legal cases that challenge the theory of luck over skills. According to DeDonno, the person who takes home the winnings is likely to pay higher taxes when money is considered earned by luck.

His article, "Poker is a Skill," written with Douglas Detterman, Case Western Reserve psychologist, caught the attention of the journal, Gaming Law Review, which has been examining this luck-skill debate and recently published psychologists' findings.

"This article provides empirical evidence that it is skill and not luck," concluded DeDonno from his two studies.

In the first study, DeDonno had 41 college students play eight games, totaling 200 hands, of Turbo Texas Hold'em, a computerized simulation of 10-player Hold'em poker. The game consists of being dealt two cards in the first round. The player must decide whether to play or quit based on the hand. If the person decides to play, then three cards are dealt for the community pot. Again, the player has to decide whether to play or stop. The player must also consider the betting patterns of the other players in making a decision in moving to the next round. If continuing, then the player sees another card and has to decide again to bet or lay down the cards. This is repeated until there are five cards on the table.

Overall most of the students had little experience playing poker, said DeDonno.

Half of the students in the first group were given charts that ranked the two-card combinations from best to the worst and also learned that professional poker players typically play about 15 percent of the hands dealt them. The other group was given background on the history of poker with no strategies.

He found that students given some strategies to make decisions did better than those without the strategies.

When starting the study, almost two-thirds of the students (64 percent) felt that winning at poker was 50 percent luck.

"If it had been pure luck in winning, then the strategies would not have made a difference for the two groups," said DeDonno.

To statistically verify the results from the first study, he conducted a second study, but had students play 720 hands. Again the group was divided into those provided with strategies and those with just a history of playing poker. While all students improved their playing with practice over the large number of hands, the group given strategies continued to do better than those without the added information.

He also found that students reduced the average number of hands played at the beginning (27) to 15 hands after given strategies, which improved their games and validated that "fewer hands does result in improved performance."

DeDonno's research evolved from his interest in playing poker. He wanted to determine if there was a correlation between intelligence and the ability to play the game. But the focus shifted to the luck-skill issue.

According to DeDonno, using poker strategies has some real life applications in such areas as investments and buying a home where partial information is available. He also discovered that the poker simulation has applications in psychological testing for decision making and risk taking.

But in DeDonno's final analysis, skill wins out in playing poker.

In a study of New Zealand's "living dinosaur" the tuatara, evolutionary biologist, and ancient DNA expert, Professor David Lambert and his team from the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution recovered DNA sequences from the bones of ancient tuatara, which are up to 8000 years old. They found that, although tuatara have remained largely physically unchanged over very long periods of evolution, they are evolving - at a DNA level - faster than any other animal yet examined. The research will be published in the March issue of Trends in Genetics.

"What we found is that the tuatara has the highest molecular evolutionary rate that anyone has measured," Professor Lambert says.

The rate of evolution for Adélie penguins, which Professor Lambert and his team have studied in the Antarctic for many years, is slightly slower than that of the tuatara. The tuatara rate is significantly faster than for animals including the cave bear, lion, ox and horse.

"Of course we would have expected that the tuatara, which does everything slowly - they grow slowly, reproduce slowly and have a very slow metabolism - would have evolved slowly. In fact, at the DNA level, they evolve extremely quickly, which supports a hypothesis proposed by the evolutionary biologist Allan Wilson, who suggested that the rate of molecular evolution was uncoupled from the rate of morphological evolution."

Allan Wilson was a pioneer of molecular evolution. His ideas were controversial when introduced 40 years ago, but this new research supports them.

Professor Lambert says the finding will be helpful in terms of future study and conservation of the tuatara, and the team now hopes to extend the work to look at the evolution of other animal species.

"We want to go on and measure the rate of molecular evolution for humans, as well as doing more work with moa and Antarctic fish to see if rates of DNA change are uncoupled in these species. There are human mummies in the Andes and some very good samples in Siberia where we have some collaborators, so we are hopeful we will be able to measure the rate of human evolution in these animals too."

The tuatara, Sphendon punctatus, is found only in New Zealand and is the only surviving member of a distinct reptilian order Sphehodontia that lived alongside early dinosaurs and separated from other reptiles 200 million years ago in the Upper Triassic period.

Final results from the University of Utah's High-Resolution Fly's Eye cosmic ray observatory show that the most energetic particles in the universe rarely reach Earth at full strength because they come from great distances, so most of them collide with radiation left over from the birth of the universe.

The findings are based on nine years of observations at the now-shuttered observatory on the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Ground. They confirm a 42-year-old prediction - known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) "cutoff," "limit" or "suppression" - about the behavior of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, which carry more energy than any other known particle.

The idea is that most - but not all - cosmic ray particles with energies above the GZK cutoff cannot reach Earth because they lose energy when they collide with "cosmic microwave background radiation," which was discovered in 1965 and is the "afterglow" of the "big bang" physicists believe formed the universe 13 billion years ago.

The journal Physical Review Letters published the results Friday, March 21.

The GZK limit's existence was first predicted by Kenneth Greisen of Cornell University while visiting the University of Utah in 1966, and independently by Georgiy Zatsepin and Vadim Kuzmin of Moscow's Lebedev Institute of Physics.

"It has been the goal of much of ultrahigh-energy cosmic ray physics for the past 40 years to find this cutoff or disprove it," says physics Professor Pierre Sokolsky, dean of the University of Utah College of Science and leader of the study by a collaboration of 60 scientists from seven research institutions. "For the first time in 40 years, that question is answered: there is a cutoff."

That conclusion, based on 1997-early 2006 observations at the High Resolution Fly's Eye cosmic ray observatory (nicknamed HiRes) in Utah's western desert, has been bolstered by the new Auger cosmic ray observatory in Argentina. During a cosmic ray conference in Merida, Mexico, last summer, Auger physicists outlined preliminary, unpublished results showing that the number of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays reaching Earth drops sharply above the cutoff.

So both the HiRes and Auger findings contradict Japan's now-defunct Akeno Giant Air Shower Array (AGASA), which observed roughly 10 times more of the highest-energy cosmic rays - and thus suggested there was no GZK cutoff.

Last November, the Auger observatory collaboration - to which Sokolsky also belongs - published a study suggesting that the highest-energy cosmic rays come from active galactic nuclei or AGNs, or the hearts of extremely active galaxies believed to harbor supermassive black holes.

AGNs are distributed throughout the universe, so confirmation that the GZK cutoff is real suggests that if ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays are spewed out by AGNs, they primarily are very distant from the Earth - at least in Northern Hemisphere skies viewed by the HiRes observatory. University of Utah physics Professor Charlie Jui, a co-author of the new study, says that means galaxies beyond our "local" supercluster of galaxies at distances of at least 150 million light years from Earth, or roughly 870 billion billion miles. [In U.S. usage, billion billion is correct here and in subsequent references for 10 to the 18th power. In British usage, 10 to the 18th power should be million billion.]

However, unpublished results from HiRes do not find the same correlation that Auger did between ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays and active galactic nuclei. So there still is uncertainty about the true source of extremely energetic cosmic rays.

"We still don't know where they're coming from, but they're coming from far away," Sokolsky says. "Now that we know the GZK cutoff is there, we have to look at sources much farther out."

In addition to the University of Utah, High Resolution Fly's Eye scientists are from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Columbia University in New York, Rutgers University - the State University of New Jersey, Montana State University in Bozeman, the University of Tokyo and the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

Cosmic rays, discovered in 1912, are subatomic particles: the nuclei of mostly hydrogen (bare protons) and helium, but also of some heavier elements such as oxygen, carbon, nitrogen or even iron. The sun and other stars emit relatively low-energy cosmic rays, while medium-energy cosmic rays come from exploding stars.

The source of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays has been a mystery for almost a century. The recent Auger observatory results have given the edge to the popular theory they originate from active galactic nuclei. They are 100 million times more energetic than anything produced by particle smashers on Earth. The energy of one such subatomic particle has been compared with that of a lead brick dropped on a foot or a fast-pitched baseball hitting the head.

"Quite apart from arcane physics, we are talking about understanding the origin of the most energetic particles produced by the most energetic acceleration process in the universe," Sokolsky says. "It's a question of how much energy the universe can pack into these extraordinarily tiny particles known as cosmic rays. ... How high the energy can be in principle is unknown. By the time they get to us, they have lost that energy."

He adds: "Looking at energy processes at the very edge of what's possible in the universe is going to tell us how well we understand nature."

Ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays are considered to be those above about 1 billion billion electron volts (1 times 10 to the 18th power).

The most energetic cosmic ray ever found was detected over Utah in 1991 and carried an energy of 300 billion billion electron volts (3 times 10 to the 20th power). It was detected by the University of Utah's original Fly's Eye observatory, which was built at Dugway during 1980-1981 and improved in 1986. A better observatory was constructed during 1994-1999 and named the High Resolution Fly's Eye.

Jui says that during its years of operation, HiRes detected only four of the highest-energy cosmic rays - those with energies above 100 billion billion electron volts. AGASA detected 11, even though it was only one-fourth as sensitive as HiRes.

The new study covers HiRes operations during 1997 through 2006, and cosmic rays above the GZK cutoff of 60 billion billion electron volts (6 times 10 to the 19th power). During that period, the observatory detected 13 such cosmic rays, compared with 43 that would be expected without the cutoff. So the detection of only 13 indicates the GZK limit is real, and that most ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays are blocked by cosmic microwave background radiation so that few reach Earth without losing energy.

The discrepancy between HiRes Fly's Eye and AGASA is thought to stem from their different methods for measuring cosmic rays.

HiRes used multifaceted (like a fly's eye) sets of mirrors and photomultiplier tubes to detect faint ultraviolet fluorescent flashes in the sky generated when incoming cosmic ray particles hit Earth's atmosphere. Sokolsky and University of Utah physicist George Cassiday won the prestigious 2008 Panofsky Prize for developing the method.

HiRes measured a cosmic ray's energy and direction more directly and reliably than AGASA, which used a grid-like array of "scintillation counters" on the ground.

University of Tokyo, University of Utah and other scientists now are using the new $17 million Telescope Array cosmic ray observatory west of Delta, Utah, which includes three sets of fluorescence detectors and 512 table-like scintillation detectors spread over 400 square miles - in other words, the two methods that produced conflicting results at HiRes and AGASA. One goal is to figure out why ground detectors gave an inflated count of the number of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays.

The Telescope Array also will try to explain an apparent shortage in the number of cosmic rays at energies about 10 times lower than the GZK cutoff. This ankle-shaped dip in the cosmic ray spectrum is a deficit of cosmic rays at energies of about 5 billion billion electron volts.

Sokolsky says there is debate over whether the "ankle" represents cosmic rays that run out of "oomph" after being spewed by exploding stars in our galaxy, or the loss of energy predicted to occur when ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays from outside our galaxy collide with the big bang's afterglow, generating electrons and antimatter positrons.

The Telescope Array and Auger observatories will keep looking for the source of rare ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays that evade the big bang afterglow and reach Earth.

"The most reasonable assumption is they are coming from a class of active galactic nuclei called blazars," Sokolsky says.

Such a galaxy center is suspected to harbor a supermassive black hole with the mass of a billion or so suns. As matter is sucked into the black hole, nearby matter is spewed outward in the form of a beam-like jet. When such a jet is pointed at Earth, the galaxy is known as a blazar.

"It's like looking down the barrel of a gun," Sokolsky says. "Those guys are the most likely candidates for the source of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays."

Although many researchers have believed women choose partners based on the kind of relationship they are seeking, a new study from The University of Texas at Austin reveals women's preferences can be influenced by their own attractiveness.

David Buss, psychology researcher at the university, has published the findings in "Attractive Women Want it All: Good Genes, Economic Investment, Parenting Proclivities and Emotional Commitment" in this month's Evolutionary Psychology.

Previous researchers argued that what women value depended on the type of relationship they were looking for. Women looking for long-term partners want someone who will be a good provider for them and their children, but women seeking short-term flings care more about masculinity and physical attractiveness, features that may be passed down to children.

Buss and Todd Shackelford, psychology professor at Florida Atlantic University, found women ideally want partners who have all the characteristics they desire, but they will calibrate their standards based on their own desirability.

"When reviewing the qualities they desire in romantic partners, women gauge what they can get based on what they got," Buss said. "And women who are considered physically attractive maintain high standards for prospective partners across a variety of characteristics."

The researchers identified four categories of characteristics women seek in a partner:

* good genes, reflected in desirable physical traits,

* resources,

* the desire to have children and good parenting skills, and

* loyalty and devotion.

Most women attempt to secure the best combination of the qualities they desire from the same man, but the researchers said a small portion of women who do not find a partner with all the qualities may trade some characteristics for others.

Although women's selectivity across categories reflected how attractive they appeared to other people, the researchers found the characteristics men desired in a partner did not vary based on their own physical attractiveness.

A mysterious area of layered bedrock on Mars was formed by a volcanic explosion on the red planet, research shows. "Spirit," one of NASA's two Mars Exploration Rovers, mapped the tabletop-like geologic formation, which scientists call "Home Plate" because of its shape resembling a home plate used in baseball.

The analysis shows that the outcrop's layered debris probably resulted from a volcanic explosion, in which larger grains fell first and were buried under finer materials and later rearranged by wind. The findings were reported in the journal Science.

The camera you own has one main lens and produces a flat, two-dimensional photograph, whether you hold it in your hand or view it on your computer screen. On the other hand, a camera with two lenses (or two cameras placed apart from each other) can take more interesting 3-D photos.

But what if your digital camera saw the world through thousands of tiny lenses, each a miniature camera unto itself" You'd get a 2-D photo, but you'd also get something potentially more valuable: an electronic "depth map" containing the distance from the camera to every object in the picture, a kind of super 3-D.

Stanford electronics researchers, lead by electrical engineering Professor Abbas El Gamal, are developing such a camera, built around their "multi-aperture image sensor." They've shrunk the pixels on the sensor to 0.7 microns, several times smaller than pixels in standard digital cameras. They've grouped the pixels in arrays of 256 pixels each, and they're preparing to place a tiny lens atop each array.

"It's like having a lot of cameras on a single chip," said Keith Fife, a graduate student working with El Gamal and another electrical engineering professor, H.-S. Philip Wong. In fact, if their prototype 3-megapixel chip had all its micro lenses in place, they would add up to 12,616 "cameras."

Point such a camera at someone's face, and it would, in addition to taking a photo, precisely record the distances to the subject's eyes, nose, ears, chin, etc. One obvious potential use of the technology: facial recognition for security purposes.

But there are a number of other possibilities for a depth-information camera: biological imaging, 3-D printing, creation of 3-D objects or people to inhabit virtual worlds, or 3-D modeling of buildings.

The technology is expected to produce a photo in which almost everything, near or far, is in focus. But it would be possible to selectively defocus parts of the photo after the fact, using editing software on a computer

Knowing the exact distance to an object might give robots better spatial vision than humans and allow them to perform delicate tasks now beyond their abilities. "People are coming up with many things they might do with this," Fife said. The three researchers published a paper on their work in the February edition of the IEEE ISSCC Digest of Technical Papers.

Their multi-aperture camera would look and feel like an ordinary camera, or even a smaller cell phone camera. The cell phone aspect is important, Fife said, given that "the majority of the cameras in the world are now on phones."

Here's how it works:
The main lens (also known as the objective lens) of an ordinary digital camera focuses its image directly on the camera's image sensor, which records the photo. The objective lens of the multi-aperture camera, on the other hand, focuses its image about 40 microns (a micron is a millionth of a meter) above the image sensor arrays. As a result, any point in the photo is captured by at least four of the chip's mini-cameras, producing overlapping views, each from a slightly different perspective, just as the left eye of a human sees things differently than the right eye.

The outcome is a detailed depth map, invisible in the photograph itself but electronically stored along with it. It's a virtual model of the scene, ready for manipulation by computation. "You can choose to do things with that image that you weren't able to do with the regular 2-D image," Fife said. "You can say, 'I want to see only the objects at this distance,' and suddenly they'll appear for you. And you can wipe away everything else."

Or the sensor could be deployed naked, with no objective lens at all. By placing the sensor very close to an object, each micro lens would take its own photo without the need for an objective lens. It has been suggested that a very small probe could be placed against the brain of a laboratory mouse, for example, to detect the location of neural activity.

Other researchers are headed toward similar depth-map goals from different approaches. Some use intelligent software to inspect ordinary 2-D photos for the edges, shadows or focus differences that might infer the distances of objects. Others have tried cameras with multiple lenses, or prisms mounted in front of a single camera lens. One approach employs lasers; another attempts to stitch together photos taken from different angles, while yet another involves video shot from a moving camera.

But El Gamal, Fife and Wong believe their multi-aperture sensor has some key advantages. It's small and doesn't require lasers, bulky camera gear, multiple photos or complex calibration. And it has excellent color quality. Each of the 256 pixels in a specific array detects the same color. In an ordinary digital camera, red pixels may be arranged next to green pixels, leading to undesirable "crosstalk" between the pixels that degrade color.

The sensor also can take advantage of smaller pixels in a way that an ordinary digital camera cannot, El Gamal said, because camera lenses are nearing the optical limit of the smallest spot they can resolve. Using a pixel smaller than that spot will not produce a better photo. But with the multi-aperture sensor, smaller pixels produce even more depth information, he said.

The technology also may aid the quest for the huge photos possible with a gigapixel camera-that's 140 times as many pixels as today's typical 7-megapixel cameras. The first benefit of the Stanford technology is straightforward: Smaller pixels mean more pixels can be crowded onto the chip.

The second benefit involves chip architecture. With a billion pixels on one chip, some of them are sure to go bad, leaving dead spots, El Gamal said. But the overlapping views provided by the multi-aperture sensor provide backups when pixels fail.

The researchers are now working out the manufacturing details of fabricating the micro-optics onto a camera chip.

The finished product may cost less than existing digital cameras, the researchers say, because the quality of a camera's main lens will no longer be of paramount importance. "We believe that you can reduce the complexity of the main lens by shifting the complexity to the semiconductor," Fife said.

That unanticipated eureka moment has led researchers at the school to the discovery of the oldest known record of rabbits. The fossil evidence in hand, found in west-central India, predates the oldest previously known rabbits by several million years and extends the record of the whole category of the animal on the Indian subcontinent by 35 million years.

Published online in the February Proceedings of the Royal Society, the investigators say previous fossil and molecular data suggested that rabbits and hares diverged about 35 million years ago from pikas, a mousy looking member of the family Ochotonidae in the order of lagomorphs, which also includes all of the family Leporidae encompassing rabbits and hares.

But the team led by Johns Hopkins's Rose found that their rabbit bones were very similar in characteristics to previously unreported Chinese rabbit fossils that date to the Middle Eocene epoch, about 48 million years ago. The Indian fossils, dating from about 53 million years ago, appear to show advanced rabbit-like features, according to Rose.

"What we have suggests that diversification among the Lagamorpha group-all modern day hares, rabbits and pikas-may already have started by the Early Eocene," says Rose, professor in the Center for Functional Anatomy and Evolution at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Rose says the new discovery was delayed a few years because the researchers had not been looking specifically to determine the age of rabbits. "We found these bones on a dig in India a few years ago and didn't know what animal they came from, so we held onto them and figured we'd look at them later," he says. "It didn't occur to us they would be rabbits because there were no known rabbits that early in time and the only known rabbits from that part of the world are from central Asia."

But one day, while using the jackrabbit foot bones as a teaching tool for a class, the shape of the bones in the class struck him as something he'd seen before among his collection of unidentified bones.

Sure enough, the tiny bones about a quarter of an inch long from India looked remarkably similar to ankle and foot bones from modern day jackrabbits, which are 4 to 5 times bigger.

Rose and his team set out and measured every dimension of their Indian bones and compared them to eight living species of rabbits and hares. They also compared them to two species of the related pika-that mouse-like, mountain-dwelling critter that lives in the Rocky Mountains of North America, among other places.

Using a technique called character analysis, the team first recorded measurements of 20 anatomical features of the bones, which showed that the bones are definitely Lagomorph and closer to rabbits than pikas. The scientists then ran a series of statistical tests on the individual measurements to see how they compared with the Chinese fossils as well as living rabbits and pikas. They found that although the Indian fossils resemble pikas in some primitive features, they look more like rabbits in specialized bone features.

Asked how many years of good luck one gets with a 53 million-year-old rabbit foot bone, Rose quipped that he "already got lucky with the feet, but what we really would like are some teeth that tell how different these animals really were."

Young girls who are hyperactive are more likely to get hooked on smoking, under-perform in school or jobs and gravitate towards mentally abusive relationships as adults, according to a joint study by researchers from the Université de Montréal and the University College London (UCL).

The study, published in the latest issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, followed 881 Canadian girls from the ages of six to 21 years to see how hyperactive or aggressive behaviour in childhood could affect early adulthood. The research team found that one in 10 girls monitored showed high levels of hyperactive behaviour. Another one in ten girls showed both high levels of hyperactive and physically aggressive behaviour.

"Few studies have looked at the consequences of aggressive and hyperactive behaviour in girls," said UCL lead researcher, Nathalie Fontaine. "This study shows that hyperactivity combined with aggressive behaviour in girls as young as six years old may lead to greater problems with abusive relationships, lack of job prospects and teenage pregnancies."

Girls with hyperactive behaviour (restlessness, jumping up and down, a difficulty keeping still or fidgety), while girls exhibiting physical aggression (fighting, bullying, kicking, biting or hitting) were found to have a high risk of developing adjustment problems in adulthood.

The study also found that hyperactive or aggressive girls were more vulnerable to grow into smoking, psychologically abusive partners and poor performance in school. What's more, females with both hyperactivity and physical aggression reported physical and psychological aggression towards their partner, along with early pregnancy and dependency on welfare.

"Our study suggests that girls with chronic hyperactivity and physical aggression in childhood should be targeted by intensive prevention programmes in elementary school, because they are more likely to have serious adjustment problems later in life," cautioned Dr. Fontaine. "Programmes targeting only physical aggression may be missing a significant proportion of at-risk girls. In fact, our results suggest that targeting hyperactive behaviour will include the vast majority of aggressive girls."

Not all hyperactive and physically aggressive girls, however, grow up with serious adjustment problems, according to co-author Richard Tremblay, a professor of psychology, pediatrics and psychiatry and director of the Research Unit on Children's Psycho-Social Maladjustment at the Université de Montréal and Sainte-Justine Hospital.

"We found that about 25 per cent of the girls with behavioural problems in childhood did not have adjustment problems in adulthood, although more than a quarter developed at least three adjustment problems," Dr. Tremblay said, noting additional research is needed into related social aggression such as rumour spreading, peer group exclusion. "We need to find what triggers aggression and how to prevent such behavioural problems."

Scientists have discovered dozens of planets outside our own solar system in recent years. Most of the new planets are probably huge balls of gas, more like Jupiter than Earth. But scientists say the increasing rate at which they're finding new planets make it almost a certainty that the galaxy is also swarming with smaller, rocky, and potentially habitable worlds that have so far eluded detection.

That was the case in October 2003 on Canada's Banks Island, at the edge of the Beaufort Sea inside the Arctic Circle. Rain fell for several days on top of a 6-inch snow cover, and the rain seeped through the snow to the soil surface. The temperature then plunged and the water became a thick layer of ice that lasted the winter and prevented browsing animals from reaching their food supply of lichens and mosses at the soil's surface. Some 20,000 musk oxen starved to death.

"Starvation happened over a period of many months and no one knew until they went up to do the population count the next spring," said Thomas Grenfell, a University of Washington research professor of atmospheric sciences who has studied the Banks Island event.

Grenfell and Jaakko Putkonen, a UW research associate professor of Earth and space sciences, have found evidence of the 2003 rain-on-snow occurrence in passive satellite microwave imagery, which they believe could provide a signature to help detect such events anywhere. They detail their work in a paper to be published March 25 in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Their methods could provide native people, whose livelihood depends on hoofed animals such as musk oxen, reindeer and caribou with a realistic chance of getting food to the herds to prevent mass starvation.

"We are talking about Banks Island, but this applies to the whole Arctic - Alaska, northern Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia - wherever there is permafrost," Putkonen said.

Grenfell has conducted more than 40 field experiments in polar regions and has become quite familiar with precipitation characteristics there. Much of the previous work he did was with researchers who were interested in the nature of the snowpack, but he found that the presence of water interfered with interpreting satellite microwave readings.

But for the new research, the signal from water was key. Grenfell and Putkonen looked for patterns in satellite microwave data that correlated with rain-on-snow events. They examined data from 10 different satellite microwave channels, each providing slightly different information on the condition of the snowpack.

"The subtleties in the microwave levels mean there can be high error margins on this information, but the Banks Island event stood out like a sore thumb in the data," Grenfell said.

The researchers hope to examine other satellite microwave records in search of evidence of rain-on-snow events during the last 30 years that are known from anecdotal information.

The 2003 rain-on-snow event affected the northern part of the 43,000-square-mile Banks Island. The musk oxen population of 70,000 was cut by nearly 30 percent, but a caribou herd on the southern part of the island was unaffected. The closest weather station, about 60 miles from the musk oxen range, didn't record any rainfall at the time of the event that resulted in the massive die off, so few people recognized that the oxen were in distress.

Currently there is no way to know exactly where or how often these potentially devastating rain-on-snow events occur, the researchers say, but using satellite data to locate them could make up for a scarcity of weather stations in the sparsely populated Arctic.

Rain-on-snow events historically have occurred mostly in coastal areas. However, in earlier research Putkonen found that models predict that climate change will push winter rainfall much farther into northern continents and large islands.

While food shortages can trigger a large die off, there also can be severe consequences from milder events that force animals to exert more energy to get food. That reduces body weight and limits reproduction, which in turn can cause long-term damage to herds.

"Because the Arctic stays well below freezing for eight to 10 months of the year, the ice layer can stay around for months. If a rain-on-snow event happens in the fall, these animals can go the whole winter without access to food," Putkonen said. "The native people in the north depend on these animals for food and for many other things."

Watch a video of activists from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society confronting a Japanese whaling ship. In the video, the captain of the Sea Shepherd anti-whaling ship, the Steve Irwin, appears to have been shot. Paul Watson says members of his crew threw stink bombs aboard the whaling ship, the Nisshin Maru, and the Japanese responded by returning flash grenades. He says one of his crew was hit by a grenade and received minor injuries.

Paola Laiolo and colleagues at the Spanish Council of Research (CSIC) studied the metapopulation system of the Dupont's lark in north-eastern Spain and found an association between individual song diversity and the viability of the population as a whole, as measured by the annual rate of population change. This association arises because males from the most numerous and productive populations, i.e. those less prone to extinction, sang songs with greater complexity. The findings are published in this week's PLoS ONE.

Birds from smaller populations sang less complex songs as they experienced a poor cultural milieu (as songs are learned), and had possibly a lower mating success. Cultural attributes may therefore reflect not only individual-level characteristics, but also emergent population-level properties. This finding opens the way to the study of animal cultural diversity in the increasingly common human-altered landscapes.

More than 500 songbird species are globally threatened, most of them because of habitat loss and fragmentation in a variety of ecosystems and remote regions. In these conditions, traditional long-term population monitoring is a difficult if not unaffordable task. Given its easily quantifiable nature, this study suggests that birdsong could become an early warning signal of populations in trouble.

In the experiment, the researchers send a pulse of light into both ends of a twisted loop of optical fiber. Pairs of photons of the same color traveling in either direction will, every so often, interact in a process known as "four-wave mixing," converting into two new, entangled photons, one that is redder and the other that is bluer than the originals.

Although the fiber's twist means that pairs emerging from one end are vertically polarized (having electric fields that vibrate up and down) while pairs from the other end are horizontally polarized (vibrating side to side), the setup makes it impossible to determine which path the newly created photon pairs took. Since the paths are indistinguishable, the weird rules of quantum physics say that the photon pairs actually will be in both states-horizontal and vertical polarization-at the same time. Until someone measures one, at which time both photons must chose one specific, and identical, state.

This "spooky action at a distance" is what caused Einstein to consider quantum mechanics to be incomplete, prompting debate for the past 73 years over the concepts of "locality" and "realism." Decades of experiments have demonstrated that measurements on pairs of entangled particles don't agree with the predictions made by "local realism," the concept that processes occurring at one place have no immediate effect on processes at another place (locality) and that the particles have definite, preexisting properties (called "hidden variables") even without being measured (realism).

Experiments so far have ruled out locality and realism as a combination. But could a theory assuming only one of them be correct" Nonlocal hidden variables (NLHV) theories would allow for the possibility of hidden variables but would concede nonlocality, the idea that a measurement on a particle at one location may have an immediate effect on a particle at a separate location.

Measuring the polarizations of the pairs of entangled particles in their setup, the researchers showed that the results did not agree with the predictions of certain NLHV theories but did agree with the predictions of quantum mechanics. In this way, they were able to rule out certain NLHV theories. Their results agree with other groups that have performed similar experiments.

Botulinum toxin, also called Botox, is best known as one of the most commonly used molecules to reduce wrinkles. It is also known as one of the most poisonous naturally occurring substances.

Now, thanks to Dr. Sam Daniel, Associate Director of Research of the Otorhinolaryngology Division at the Montreal Children's Hospital of the McGill University Health Centre, this protein has become an effective method to save newborns suffering from CHARGE Syndrome from having to undergo devastating tracheotomies. Dr. Daniel describes the case of the first infant patient treated with the toxin in an article from the Archives of Otolaryngology dated March 17th.

CHARGE Syndrome is rare, but it can become life-threatening in its most severe form. The syndrome includes a variety of birth defects in different organs, such as the heart, eyes or ears, but it also affects the salivary glands. They are hyper-stimulated and secrete excessive fluids that are discarded into the lungs, causing asphyxia. This was the case for the patient that Dr. Daniel discusses in his article: at the age of two and a half months, little Franck (not his real name) was still unable to breathe without assistance and a tracheotomy seemed inevitable in order to relieve his respiratory system.

Seeing the despair of Franck's parents, Dr. Daniel proposed an experimental treatment as a last recourse: the injection of a minute dose of Botox into each of Franck's salivary glands. This had never been done before on such a young child, but no other option could prevent permanent intubation. Two weeks after the injections, Franck's extubation was a success. He now leads the normal life of a three-year-old boy at home with his parents.

Botulinum toxin is a very powerful neurotoxin, meaning that it blocks nerve activity. In Franck's case, it blocked the nerves that stimulated his salivary glands thereby reducing their secretions to a normal level. The infant then needed repeated injections every four to six months for one and a half years until his glands shrunk and stopped overproducing saliva.

Since this first attempt 5 years ago, Dr. Daniel has performed over 1000 Botox injections in young children including 12 in newborns. "This treatment is extremely effective, and to date I have not encountered any major side effects despite the bad press Botox got recently. It also helps us considerably improve the lives of our patients," he explained.

The researchers learned that particle motion is strongly linked to how the particles arrange themselves in a channel.

"Particle arrangements are determined by the interactions of the particles with their boundaries. Thus, we were able to use these interactions as a means for controlling how readily the fluid will self-mix, diffuse, and flow," said Dr. Thomas Truskett, associate professor of chemical engineering at the university.

The research by Ph.D. students Gaurav Goel, William Krekelberg and Truskett at the university along with Dr. Jeffrey Errington of the State University of New York at Buffalo, appears in the March 14 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

Civic planners and schoolteachers have long appreciated that the motion of cars on highways or children through hallways proceeds smoothly if lanes of traffic are formed. Truskett's research team found that a similar principle applies for the motion of fluid particles in narrow channels. Specifically, their computer simulations reveal that fluid particles move past one another more easily if they first form "layers" aligned with the boundaries of the channels.

The team has also introduced a way to systematically determine which types of channel boundaries will promote or frustrate the formation of the layers necessary for faster particle transport.

If layering leads to faster particle dynamics, it is natural to ask why bulk fluids adopt a more disordered structure with no layering, said Truskett.

"The reason: thermodynamics determines the structure of a fluid, not dynamics - and thermodynamics favors a disordered state for bulk fluids because it lowers the system's free energy," he said.

The Truskett team determined that confining a fluid to small length scales allowed them to tune the thermodynamically-favored state to coincide with one that has layering and fast particle dynamics.

Truskett's latest research is funded by grants from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. The Texas Advanced Computing Center and the University at Buffalo Center for Computational Research provided computational resources for this study.

The initiative is funded with a $9.7 million grant from National Institutes of Health and is the first to use animal models to help determine what the biological factors might be behind the development of certain forms of breast cancer.

Gehlert is lead author of the paper discussing the findings, titled "Targeting Health Disparities: Linking Upstream Determinants to Downstream Interventions" published in the current issue of Health Affairs.

Joining Gehlert, who is the Helen Ross Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University, as an author in the paper is Olufunmilayo Olopade, the Walter L. Palmer Distinguished Service Professor in Medicine and Human Genetics at the University. As part of the work of the CIHDR, Olopade and other scholars studied early onset breast cases in Nigerian women, whose genetic heritage is similar to African-Americans' because the ancestors of African-Americans largely came from West Africa.

African-American, like Nigerian, women, develop breast cancer earlier than white women, and it is often much deadlier. While white women usually develop the disease after menopause, it develops prior to menopause among women of African heritage.

Co-author Martha McClintock, the David Lee Shillinglaw Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology at the University, carried out the animal modeling by studying the development of spontaneous mammary tumors in socially isolated rats.

Researchers are studying 230 black women with newly diagnosed breast cancers living in predominantly black Chicago neighborhoods to learn about environmental factors, such as neighborhood features that might lead to social isolation.

"These women experience stress from dealing with situations they cannot control, from seeing crime in their neighborhood, from being afraid to go out, and not being able to form casual relationships with their neighbors that might make them feel safe," Gehlert said.

By studying multiple pathways to the development of the disease, leading from environmental challenges to gene regulation, the team will help inform policy makers about making decisions in how to create cost-effective interventions, McClintock said.

The team said that the women's vulnerability to stress and social isolation could be reduced if communities work with neighborhood and city leaders to reduce building vacancies and establish networks that would give women a greater feeling of control over their environments.

Other authors in the study are University researchers Dana Sohmer, Tina Sacks and Charles Mininger.

A bonnethead shark born in 2001 in a Nebraska zoo was the result of a so-called virgin birth, DNA evidence shows. It is the first confirmed case of a female shark fertilizing her own eggs and giving birth without sperm from a male, a process known as parthenogenesis.

Parthenogenesis has been seen in about 70 species, mainly in insects but also in several lizards, for example. Until now it was thought that all shark species used internal fertilization through copulation to produce their young.